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Posts tagged with the category Improving Performance

Increase Productivity Through Passion & Freedom

Greater productivity should be a goal of just about every organization. It is often challenged, however, by ever-tightening budgets and low employee morale. Nevertheless, increasing productivity can be accomplished without a lot of money and ultimately result in raising employee engagement. To do this, nothing works better than appealing to people...

Mainstream Mindfulness

The Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program developed by Jon Kabat Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School is now a global phenomenon with programs running in every continent. Mindfulness studies conducted from the school’s Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, and involving over 20,000...

Valuing Diverse Personality Types in Workgroups

Today’s workgroups are made up of people from a variety of cultures, ethnicities, ages, and backgrounds. They also include different personalities. High performing workgroups are those that embrace and leverage these personality differences in order to achieve outstanding results.
In my line of work I use many diagnostic tools and...

Predictive Analysis to Motivate Employees

Predictive analysis in human resources is becoming a lot more helpful in determining how well-suited potential employees may be for a particular company and a specific job. But what can it tell us about employee engagement?
According to a recent Wall Street Journal article regarding a soon-to-be published study by Deloitte Consulting LLP, about 5...

Radical Management

In professional services company Deloitte and Touche's The 2011 Shift Index: Measuring the Forces of Long-Term Change, the company states that the return on assets (ROA) for US firms has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of 1965 levels. This study also concludes that less than 20 percent of workers are passionate about their jobs,...

Business Models and You

Southwest, Google, Apple, McDonalds, Amazon, Wal-Mart, Cragslist and many others have influential business models that have changed industries and the way we live. A business model is what we experience as stakeholders. Unless we are intimately connected to an organization, we do not know or understand its strategies or tactics but we...

Strategy Favors the Prepared Organizational Mind

Traditionally, organizational strategy has been cast as equal parts analysis and prediction. A small group of elite organizational leaders apply a framework (e.g. Porter’s Five Forces), consider trends that might alter the status quo, and then produce a plan to guide decision making and resource allocation for the foreseeable future. It...

Designing better worlds

There is a long lineage of systems thinkers, and systems scientists, who have proposed ways to purposefully design the social systems in which we live. Bela H. Banathy, who created the systems program at Saybrook, used an idealized approach to social systems design. John Warfield offered his Interactive Management process. His long-time colleague...

Using Scenario Planning to Prototype the Future

I’ve taken an interest in the topic of strategic thinking from both a research and a practitioner perspective. I’m currently working on a training program for mid-level leaders to help them develop their strategic thinking capabilities as they move from functional management roles into general management roles. One tool that I’ve...

The Cashier and the Envelope: A Tale of Mindful Awareness

Once upon a time (this week on Wednesday to be exact), in a city among the hills (Atlanta), a part-time cashier spotted an envelope just off the curb of the park-and-ride deck at the international terminal of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
Puzzled, the cashier picked up the envelope and found it stuffed with $7,000 in cold hard cash (...

Reconciling Stagnation and Generativity

Consciousness is a term related to awareness. Awareness of what? Awareness of ourselves and others. Those things we can observe and those that we cannot. Those we can measure and those we intuit.
Individually, our consciousness is a product of our capacities and capabilities in relation to our life conditions, those elements that impact how we...

Talking Collaboration

We talk together to collaborate (or co-labor) and we use language when we write, email, tweet, and hang out in social spaces. Our words build relationships and connect us so we can accomplish things, from nailing down project details or creating strategies to designing systems or resolving complex challenges.
We meet together to make sure everyone...